


Comfort Taken

by Anonymous



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Angst, Bondage, Cannibalism, Captivity, Cock & Ball Torture, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Drug Use, Drugged Sex, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Forced Orgasm, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Illnesses, Insomnia, Knifeplay, Laudanum, M/M, Masochism, Mutineer Era (The Terror), Non-Consensual Alcohol Use, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Oral Sex, Overstimulation, Physical Abuse, Public Humiliation, Sadism, Scurvy, Sexual Abuse, Sexual Violence, Sleep Deprivation, Smoking, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Somnophilia, Starvation, Suicidal Ideation, Suicide Attempt, Trauma Disclosure, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings, Unreliable Narrator, non-consensual cannibalism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2021-03-03 07:27:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24347227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: “You can't possibly have expected to earn my goodwill merely by treating me with a third-rate performance of respect. I did not come here out of choice. I wouldneverhave come with you out of choice.”“I know,” Hickey reassures Goodsir, slathering his glee with honey-thick kindliness, and he draws his knife.Hickey keeps Goodsir alive.
Relationships: Harry D. S. Goodsir/Cornelius Hickey, William Gibson/Cornelius Hickey
Comments: 11
Kudos: 59
Collections: Anonymous





	Comfort Taken

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many thanks to[ fatal_drum ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fatal_drum/pseuds/fatal_drum)for the beta! Any mistakes are my own!
> 
> Pls Be Advised that Chapter One is, for the most part, All Hurt.

It was Gibson who decided that they would need Goodsir, just as it was Gibson who first suggested mutiny. He is boldest in murmurs, in the background, much as quakes are at home furthest 'neath the earth, and was only too eager to recede into a voice in Hickey's ear once Hickey had taken over as _de facto_ leader of their little coup.

“He's important to maintaining the men's health, of course,” Gibson says, head ducked low on his neck and his back stooped into a steeply slouching curve, so that, for all his gangly height, he can speak very closely and quietly into Hickey's ear as they walk; Hickey can lift his arm and tap the back of his hand to Gibson's chest, and he'll go where Hickey's touch tells him, graceful as a ballroom dancer. “And he's also one of the captain's few confidantes. Taking him may buy us some time to destabilize command as much as we can.”

“Or it'll light a fire under our old man Crozier to get his dear confidant back, all to his own self,” Hickey replies, although he agrees with the suggestion, and though there are no such fires to be lit here. The hope in most of these men is dwindling into cold ashes, and there is no heat for any daring heroics out on these rocks. Not with whatever spoiled shit which is from the tins in these heroes' otherwise empty bellies.

Irving's intestines had been sad hollow when Hickey'd pulled them out and into a gory cairn, out there on the hills of this harsh Arctic desert. Gibson had been sadder, to learn of the righteous man's death, and Hickey, not in the slightest.

He will steal a coal for himself and leave, and he'll nurture it into a crackling pyre to warm his bones as the wind scatters all the rest and the devil takes the hindmost.

An anatomist is the closest thing to a proper physician available. Gibson will need the help, if he and Hickey are to make it any distance together. And Hickey is not about to let Gibson fall behind.

* * *

“Are you pleased with yourself?” Goodsir asks him. There is loathing there, but there is also some lingering vestige of honest confusion. It's almost charming to witness how he longs for some explanation, for some specific diagnosis which will make the existence of suffering comprehensible to him. “Does it bring you pleasure to orchestrate the deaths of...of _numerous_ innocent people?”

“The empire doomed us all and those poor, precious Esquimaux of yours besides, remember? When they sent us here in the first place,” Hickey says. “Or did you really believe all that noble pap they feed you about adventure and trade routes? About divine right.” He adopts a sarcastic mien of disappointed pity, sticking his lower lip out beneath his mustache as he shakes his head. “And here I've been, a _fool,_ under the _impression_ that you were...well, to put it simple for you, Doctor: smarter. Than that.”

They are sitting together in the prow of the sledge-boat while the others make camp, their boots slotted side by side even after Goodsir pulled his feet as far away from Hickey's as space allowed. Goodsir is sitting on his accompanying medicine chest, two parts of a handsomely matched set, and his wrists are bound in his lap. His boots are larger and of a better fit than Hickey's; they are his own boots, black leather scuffed gray about the toes. He is not afraid to meet Hickey's eyes with cool contempt.

“They were a family,” Goodsir says. “Those Inuit were a family, just as much as anyone, and John Irving was your commanding officer. He was someone's son.”

Every man is someone's son, generally speaking, so Hickey is not exactly swayed by this argument. He's...tickled, perhaps. Fascinated, certainly, for Goodsir really does seem moved to grief over these things. Most people are illogical like this when it comes to grief, and especially when also aggrieved and in fear and in possession of arms all at once, or so Hickey's found. Grief is predictable, and the grieving, easy marks. Much as his compassion might make Goodsir cling to it, grief is not in the least a strength. It has no use to anyone.

“We were out here to break apart the ice and to kill whatever it was we found in our way,” says Hickey. “Not because any of us were driven by high-minded ideals. It's hypocrisy to pretend otherwise, and _farcical_ to care.”

Goodsir is already shaking his head in disgust. “No. No, you _murdered_ them for your own gain.”

“And the Discovery Service was out here seeking the Passage for something _other_ than gain?” Hickey tilts his head and leans forward, and Goodsir leans back to preserve a modicum of distance between them, unease flickering across his expression before he can stifle it. Hickey drinks this in with amusement and then raises his eyebrows at him in lofty entreaty. “Gain only comes at another's loss, you know. Why not make the best of your circumstances, Mr. Goodsir? Helping us only helps you.”

Goodsir merely glowers.

* * *

Gibson slips into Hickey's tent that very first night.

“Will you mourn when I'm gone?” he asks Hickey, as they are lying together in their blankets.

“Why?” Hickey asks. “Are you afraid you'll die, Billy? Shall I fetch our little surgeon?”

“You're going to outlive me,” says Gibson. “That's what all of this has been for, Cornelius. Promise me you'll outlive me.”

Arctic summers are so bright even at night that there is light enough through the tent canvas to clearly see by, and Hickey has a good view. Gibson's gaunt frame is stretched out on his back, his skin glowing ghostly-pale over the increasingly prominent contours of his skull, the silhouette of his curls thorny at his crown and against the pillow. His eyes are like glass, shadows pooling in and around them in the gentle gloom. He is not looking at Hickey.

Hickey thinks that Gibson must be imagining the two of them growing old together; imagining himself on a deathbed, wasting away in his old age, and that he is failing to imagine Hickey crying at his bedside with Gibson's withered hand clasped in his.

“Of course,” says E.C.

* * *

Goodsir doesn't struggle when they put him in the traces. He hauls with all the others, his chest leaning forward to pull taut the line, and when he is not staring at the rocks passing beneath his feet he is scanning the horizon in dogged, poorly-concealed hope.

On the second night he tries to make a run for it.

Des Voeux drags Goodsir into Hickey's tent and throws him down to his hands and knees with something of a slight surplus of violence. He nods to Hickey before stepping outside again, but does not salute; mutineers, Hickey figures, are beyond the enforcement of such petty ceremonies. There are far greater ones to come.

“Where were you even going to go?” Hickey asks Goodsir, in a conversational tone. “I'm genuinely curious, mind you. All alone, without a map or compass, on foot. Trying to sneak away into a barren wasteland. Were you going to run until you saw a familiar rock? A familiar patch of gravel?”

Goodsir gets back to his feet and fumes in silence. Anger is funny to behold on him, and Hickey admires the way it hardens Goodsir's face into a faintly curdled parody of its habitually amiable self. There's a lovely sneer which is put onto that rosy mouth of his, drawing his upper lip crooked over his teeth, and his sidewhiskers move with the shift of muscle as he stubbornly tightens his jaw and grinds his molars. His Welsh wig sits lopsided over his hair.

“I understand that this is a novel situation you're finding yourself in,” says Hickey, slowly and sympathetically, “and that you clearly need time to adjust. So I'm not going to punish you for this frankly... _embarrassing_ lapse in your better judgment.”

“You won't resort to punitive measures on _this_ occasion, you mean,” Goodsir says. He fixes his wig, his thick fingers prim and precise as they tuck away a stray curl beneath the gray wool, his hands themselves shrouded in woolen knitwork of their own with only his fingers peeking out.

Those fingers of his would be very easy for Hickey to break. He's done it before to many a larger opponent: Yanked an index finger back until it snapped at the lowermost joint, but a surgeon's are more useful when properly attached. When they are _operable._

“See?” Hickey says, with pointedly condescending cheer, and he tousles the hat on Goodsir's head until it and the hair underneath are both in wild disarray. It is not gentle; he grinds his palm over Goodsir's pate until his scalp must hurt. “You're a smart one after all.”

Goodsir ducks away too late, eyes flashing with indignation, but Hickey can touch all he wants without consequence. No one need salute him, but Hickey can touch his downtrodden chosen with near-impunity, can clasp them with hand or find their soft bits with a blade at any time. They all know so, and they cannot deny him this same knowledge, and it is a marvelously intoxicating thing to be so free and so very feared.

Most of those here had witnessed Hickey bent over a table with the cat striking blood from his naked arse. Gibson, of course, and Tozer. Armitage and Diggle. Those who weren't assembled for Crozier's display of dominance would have heard of it. They know Hickey has no delusions of dignity or honor left to defend, and they've seen him survive something the likes of which most only have nightmares of. He gained sympathy and allies one by one. Cemented a key couple when he'd taken those lashes.

He came out the stronger for it, in the end, but it is understood that Hickey will never be forced into so powerless a position ever again.

They have been _made_ to understand.

There is a state of modest exaltation which Hickey wants to reach now that he's attained a following and needs no longer remain loyal enough to win said followers' loyalties. He's not picky how, so long as he can inspire a little _worship_ in his ragged acolytes. And what is worship, anyway, besides one's ultimate helplessness? One's surrender?

He catches Goodsir's wrist and holds him when he tries to walk out. Keeps him there in a tighter and tighter grip until the man falls still, and keeps him longer until he finally emits a whimper of pain in unwilling concession; a tiny noise, grated out from the back of his throat. For the duration he stares away from Hickey so that Hickey cannot see his face; it is possible that he is brought to tears and is ashamed, and his body trembles with what is most likely more futile anger.

Hickey's hand is smaller and slimmer, deceptively delicate in comparison, and he is rather vainly pleased with the mean picture it makes as he digs his nails into the tendons on the inside of Goodsir's hairy wrist until that big coarse deft surgeon's hand of his claws up and twists in Hickey's hold like a dying rat. When Hickey releases him Goodsir snatches his arm away to hide and rub his wrist within his own hand without looking behind himself, bowing his head as he turns his back.

Gibson enters the tent as Goodsir is leaving. It is Gibson who slips deferentially to the side to avoid collision, his chin dropping despite his looming height. He discreetly studies Goodsir as he goes, and stays looking at the tent flap for a little while after he's left.

* * *

It is wondrous to hold and behold Gibson as he sleeps. As _Gibson_ sleeps, as, more often than not, Hickey himself can't. Not with the invigoration of all this cold summertime light, and with all the euphoria in his blood and with the purity of his hunger smoldering inside him. Yet he is not tired. He simply does not sleep, and while he is awake in the night he watches his Billy as he dreams.

Gibson sleeps heavily. He _is_ so tired that Hickey thinks him half-asleep even in the day, and he chases unconsciousness as often as possible, retiring at every earliest opportunity to curl up and close his eyes. The shadow-bruises do not leave his sockets no matter how long he rests, and his lavender eyelids are so thin as to be nearly translucent. Beneath these finest sheets of skin and muscle the eyeballs roll and roam. Sometimes there are slivers of opalescent white to be glimpsed through the wispy blond fringe of his eyelashes.

He is peaceful, besides all of that. Besides his eyes' blind yet ceaseless searching. Rarely does he so much as twitch a limb, and his breathing is deep and tranquil, filling out the bony chest to its utmost and then sighing out long. Almost every night a trickle of drool will creep from the corner of his slack mouth and leave a wet patch, located invariably on either the grease-spotted pillow or somewhere upon the breast of Hickey's sweat-stained shirt.

Mutineers with limited water supplies, it so happens, are largely past doing laundry, as well. They are an island of spoor out on these oceanic fields of rocky nothing. A pile of stinking humanity. Rotting a bit more into sour musk every day, and the smell in their shared bed is one of home, and one of the only smells to be found here, where the wind is always doing its level best to sweep everything into nothing and where Gibson's mouth always tastes of filigree metals.

Hickey likes to trace the bones of Gibson's face. Whether Gibson's awake or asleep. He'll smooth the wispy brows down and groom every colorless hair neatly into place with a licked thumb, follow the high, thin line of his nose with an index finger.

Gibson's fine-boned, everything prominent and sharply-cut, with big blue eyes and a diminutive chin. An orphan waif sort of face, but for that sandy beard which Gibson used to be so particular about trimming, and overlooking the overall skeletal aspect of him, all grown and starving as he is; some unholy stretched-out changeling's child.

Maybe that's why Irving believed him. Pitied him. Felt protective of him.

Back on the ship he'd been a convenient dalliance, a comely and eager partner. Disposable enough, until he bit his venom into Hickey's heart like the timid glass viper he was. Just a little snake desperate for some sun; Hickey almost laughs sometimes to think how few truly see Gibson for what he is. He hears the pounding of his heart and feels the venom's love song tingling in his veins whenever he looks at Billy now.

Gibson's _his._ And not even he can change that.

* * *

Hickey exempts himself from hauling. This happens naturally and goes as unquestioned as when Gibson and Hickey had gradually stopped making an effort to pretend that there was no special intimacy between them.

Because he tried to run, Hickey has Goodsir's wrists tied again. Behind his back, harder for him to balance, and they are untied only when Goodsir hauls or after they have posted a guard for the night. As soon as he is switched out of the traces Hickey has Tozer or Des Voeux bind him before they resume their march. The boat chain tethers his ankle for the duration as well, and Hickey himself keeps the manacle's key.

Gibson is weakest of them, and so he does not haul as often. Every day he limps along with a little more difficulty. He drifts closer to Goodsir as time goes on.

One day he trips, and Goodsir's shoulder is there for him to catch himself on. He murmurs some apology as Goodsir steadies him, at which point Goodsir remembers his resentment and brusquely shrugs him off, but afterward Gibson is more likely than not to be found at Goodsir's side. They are the two slowest, the poorest haulers; Goodsir cannot outrun him, and so Gibson lurks at his heels.

When Goodsir is the one who next falls, Gibson tries to catch Goodsir's arm, and is surprised by Goodsir's weight. They both go down, slowly, slow as flowers withering and with comical, ponderous clumsiness, and they only bruise their four knees and a single palm among them.

Goodsir shakes himself free of Gibson that time, too. Knocks Gibson aside as he leans forward and climbs to his feet. Eyes resolutely downcast as he trudges on. Gibson, of course, lets him, and follows.

* * *

“You fancy him,” Hickey says.

“Cornelius,” Gibson sighs, as if too exhausted to argue, and he rubs at his hollow eyes with his long pale fingers. For a moment it seems as though the dark circles smear like wet ink.

“Tell me, then,” Hickey insists. He captures Gibson's hand and opens it to examine the livid indigo bruise hiding beneath the frayed mitten. He rubs his thumb across the tenderized spot of meat cradled over the center of all those little branching bones.

Gibson breathes and opens his eyes. “Is it so astonishing to simply be desirous of a friend?” he says.

“He's not the most friendly,” says Hickey.

“He doesn't need to be friendly for me to pity him,” says Gibson, in the warbling thread left of his voice, and with the faintest of humorless smiles quirking the corner of his chapped and papery lips. When Hickey kisses him it is a dry, chaste thing. A sickbed's goodnight kiss.

* * *

The second escape attempt puts Goodsir back in Hickey's tent on his knees. This time Tozer remains behind Goodsir with his hand on Goodsir's shoulder to keep him down, and Gibson is there as well, blinking with somnolent disinterest from where he lies on his side on the bed, fully clothed and with the blankets tugged inside-out over himself, his feet in their boots hanging motionless off the edge. The tent is small enough that they're all crowded to just barely missing each other.

Hickey paces in front of Goodsir for a bit, his hands folded at his back as he sadly _tsk tsks_ to himself and shakes his head. When he comes to a final stop and plants his feet in front of Goodsir, Goodsir meets his gaze with one of undisguised scorn.

“Oh, my dear Dr. Goodsir,” says Hickey. “Whatever am I to do with you?”

“Don't call me a doctor,” Goodsir replies. “Whatever else you'd do, I'd prefer you keep that particular lie off your—tongue.” There is the slightest catch which indicates he'd barely omitted some colorful description of Hickey's tongue, probably regarding the vileness thereof.

“Henry, then? Or...Harry?” Hickey asks, wheedling, but Goodsir gathers his dignity and refrains from blurting out any more of his preferences for Hickey to take note of.

“Was it a mistake, to free your hands every night to let you sleep? Did you think to take advantage of my magnanimous nature?”

Goodsir looks down to his wrists where they have been hastily bound in front of him. Hickey grabs his chin and forces his head back up. After a reluctant second longer the eyes follow.

“You have your own tent, with a bed all your own,” says Hickey. “Your own little space and a place among us. And yet you would so carelessly cast us aside.”

“You can't possibly have expected to earn my goodwill merely by treating me with a third-rate performance of respect. I did not come here out of choice. I would _never_ have come with you out of choice.”

“I know,” Hickey reassures Goodsir, slathering his glee with honey-thick kindliness, and he draws his knife.

The surgeon has just enough self-preservation to go still and to smooth his expression when Hickey lifts Goodsir's chin a little higher and places the knife's edge against his throat.

“Sergeant. Would you fetch Mr. Goodsir's medicine chest?”

Tozer is no doubt very aware of _any_ physician's potential value to his own welfare. It is because of this that he hesitates for the briefest amount of time—in deliberation, rather than out of worry for Goodsir—before he leaves to do so.

Goodsir painstakingly builds and then maintains a veneer of subdued defiance as they wait. He has not been keeping up with his grooming; there is no Welsh wig hiding the shiny wind-tossed mess of his curls, and his facial hair is growing out dark and bristly. Hickey rolls his thumb over the rough of it and pinches the flesh of Goodsir's chin until his lower lip is pulled down enough for Hickey to see the delicate, yellowing row of the lower incisors inside his sneer.

He shivers with revulsion beneath Hickey's touch, but dares neither to jerk away nor raise his arms, not with the point of Hickey's blade tracing circles around his Adam's apple. The faint sound of metal scraping over stubble rings as musically in Hickey's ears as does the continuous rise-and-fall whistling of Gibson's lungs behind him.

Hickey undoes Goodsir's kerchief and flicks his collar open so that more of his throat is bared, and he slides his knife up and down what is revealed, lingering with the point of the knife in the notch between Goodsir's collarbones.

“Thank you, Sergeant,” says Hickey, upon Tozer's return. “That'll be all.”

“Aye,” says Tozer. He sets down the chest and ducks back out of the tent.

The walls of the Holland tent snap loudly in the wind. Every footstep is its own clattering signature outside.

Hickey bends so that his face hovers before Goodsir's face, knife under Goodsir's chin to keep it lifted, and only then does Goodsir again avert his eyes from Hickey's and down to his own bound wrists. His expression of serene loathing nevertheless falters not one whit.

Hickey looks to Goodsir's wrists as well and sees that this time they have been tied too tightly; his bare hands are a bit bloated with strangulation, dark with blood. Goodsir tries to bat at Hickey with them when Hickey releases his chin and pinches the skin on the back of his right hand to check how badly off he is, and Hickey catches the ineffectual hit without incident, holding Goodsir's hands up and slipping the blade between them. He clucks his tongue before he cuts the rope. “We need these in good working order, now, don't we.”

There are fresh red rope burns and bruises around both wrists, and before Goodsir tugs his hands from Hickey's, Hickey glimpses the crescent scabs which his own fingernails had previously put into Goodsir, right through his woolen mittens. Hickey's marks scratched into being on the shores of Goodsir's blue-river veins.

“You've made your point, thank you,” Goodsir murmurs as he lowers his arms, and with the gentlest yet firmest of convictions.

He really is such a _gentle_ man. So steeped in _civility._

“I haven't even begun to make my point,” Hickey says, and he doesn't let Goodsir finish adjusting his cuffs to better cover his wrists before he tears Goodsir's coat open into blood eagle wings of navy wool.

Goodsir tries to fight him off but his hands are clumsy and he is kneeling while Hickey is braced on his feet. The waistcoat and then his shirt follow suit, buttons fleeing the slashes of Hickey's knife. Goodsir only stops struggling when the knife is right against his skin, and even then, only after he has inadvertently cut himself on it. His chest heaves with repressed panic as the blood slides scarlet from the superficial little gash over his breast, and as Hickey tugs the neckline of his undershirt taut and slices through the collar.

There really is a trick to doing this to an uncooperative subject without stabbing and disembowelment. “You're spoiled, only having to undress nice dead corpses,” Hickey tells Goodsir. He rips apart the last section of Goodsir's undershirt in his fists instead of with the nicked-up knife and then flips the blade back around to tease the line of hair bisecting Goodsir's navel, curling his other hand up around Goodsir's coat lapel to anchor him there.

His depleted stomach shrinks away from the press of the steel. He is quaking more than ever, his shoulders hunching inward, his spine curling, belly still pulled in under his ribs. Like if he tries hard enough he will collapse in on himself.

“Do you _deserve_ these clothes you're wearing?” Hickey asks him. “Have you comported yourself in a manner which... _befits..._ clothing?”

Goodsir's eyes have gone gratifyingly luminous with tears of impotent fury, his hatred serene no longer as he seethes. Refuses to blink, even, lest the tears standing in his eyes be shed. He parts his snarling lips, his throat creaking with an aborted word, and then he tightly reunites them. Unable to so much as venture an answer at the unfairness of it.

“Is even such a simple, harmless question enough to astound you?” Hickey mocks, and he swipes his thumb through the blood to paint it into an arcing streak across the pectoral, plastering some wiry black chest hairs flat. “Rest easy, then, and I'll answer for you. You see, I _don't_ think you deserve your clothes. I don't think you deserve anything other than what I give you. And I certainly don't recall giving you _these.”_ He shakes Goodsir by the lapel.

Goodsir leans backward as he is jostled, retreating from Hickey's encroaching proximity, and Hickey lets go of the coat and goes around Goodsir so that he can stand at Goodsir's back, shoving him forward and upright. Goodsir keeps his arms stiff and a little crooked but otherwise passive at his sides. Keeps his hands lax as Hickey knifes open his cuffs and slides his braces and the rent shirts from his shoulders and down said stiff arms. They fall off of Goodsir and into a rumpled pile behind him, and Goodsir is left naked from the waist up.

His back retains enough meat yet so as not to appear emaciated, the handsome breadth and the muscle of his shoulders holding out, and of course he's squaring them in defiance of Hickey's inspection.

That's the issue with Goodsir right there: He still has pride enough for an ego. For grand notions of free will and whatnot.

Hickey taps the point of his knife against the vertebrae at the base of Goodsir's neck to see him break his posture and flinch; he does so, and his shoulder blades glide wide apart beneath his skin, his back rounding and spine protruding as he then crosses his arms.

Beyond Goodsir, Hickey finds that Gibson is now sitting up to observe the proceedings. A sharp elbow rests on one bony knee, and his chin, in the unbruised palm of that hand. He _does_ appear emaciated. Colorless and sunken-cheeked under that increasingly ragged beard, and so spindly with deprivation it's as though the sunlight would shine clean through him.

Hickey licks Goodsir's blood from his thumb and then pops his thumb from his mouth with an audible squelch; the blood is as exquisite as any nourishment is to this hungry a constitution.

The disconcerted Goodsir twitches, while Gibson doesn't. Gibson is an alabaster statue, he's watered ink on fragile paper. He is physically incapable of such a pointless expenditure, and so he watches absolutely impassively, and his eyelashes barely move an increment even when those glazed eyeballs of his do.

Hickey smooths his own mustache down with his wet thumb and starts combing each individual whisker into place, relishing the light scrape and thumbnail-scritch. When he's done with that he picks at his teeth with his knife, because the longer that he lets Goodsir kneel there with Hickey unseen behind him and with not a word spoken, the more Goodsir begins to twitch.

The inescapable chill and the fear are getting to him and Hickey discovers a nice tasty chunk of something soft secreted between his upper left canine and his premolar. The metal grates against his enamel, and he tastes the delicious brightness of it as it flavors his food and mingles with the aftertaste of some other person's blood, and as the other person's blood mingles with the taste of his own, seeping up from the gums like perpetually rising groundwater.

“Cornelius,” says Billy, “get on with it or let it end.”

“Right,” says Hickey. He smacks Goodsir hard with the flat of the blade as he again moves around Goodsir to then crouch next to the medicine chest. Hickey opens this theatrically, with both hands and an exaggerated face of wonder, as a child pretending to open a treasure chest would open it, and when he starts sorting through its contents he walks his fingertips over the stopper of every bottle and vial until he finds the last of the laudanum Goodsir's been hoarding.

He feigns surprise and betrayal as he lifts up the tiny unlabeled brown bottle. Its precious few drops of darker brown liquid collect into a lopsided skim ring around the bottom when he tilts it to the light.

 _“Hiding_ desperately needed medicines from us, Mr. Goodsir?” he says, wiggling the bottle at him. “Why, you'd claimed to be out of this as far back as when the men were begging for it at Terror Camp. Had, say, _Morfin_ asked you for some, I wonder, when he couldn't sleep for screaming? The night he and the sergeant found all those heads in the snow, for instance. Or perhaps you'd already lied to him by then. Had he already begged you for your help, Mr. Goodsir, and been rebuffed?”

“I tried to,” Goodsir immediately protests. _“Tried_ to, to _help_ h—”

 _“This_ doesn't look like helping,” Hickey interrupts, body and spirit and both eyebrows all rising. It's difficult not to bounce on his toes as he comes closer but he keeps himself to a nice decorous stroll. “In matter of fact, it rather resembles something the likes of which the others would string you up for, if they knew. With how much they all _ache_ right down to their toenails I imagine they'd relish the chance to tear _yours_ right out for this.”

Gibson's empty eyes have fixed onto Goodsir, his baggy lower lids crumpling up and his brow bisected with a crease of vague hurt. He's nothing _but_ green quick, and so he's been cut indeed; barely nicked and gushing sap. All that willow's bitterness exsanguinated in one sweet swoop.

“Let them do so, then, if you care so much,” says Goodsir to Hickey, with all the dead-steady blitheness of a hopeless man and yet none of the awe which should accompany it, and it is obvious that he is ignoring Gibson. “Have them come in here and murder me.”

Hickey supposes that Goodsir values his toenails and his life very little, to be so cavalier with them, but one's toenails and one's life are usually one's own concern. The thing which is currently of concern to _Hickey_ is this: Gibson is still watching. And Goodsir appears too compromised by guilt to even glance his way. Even as his forsaken native brogue lilts the vowels of the word _murder,_ when he says it, for that is how strong his resolve and how resolved he is in his guilt. The _cheek_ on him. The sheer clownish _cheek._

There is a sudden surge of anger in Hickey. It squeals through him like a glowing-hot icepick into frozen berg heart: Goodsir looking like that, looking as guilty over Gibson as over the random and unlucky Morfin, _Goodsir_ whole yet suffering whereas _Gibson_ is the one shriveling on the metaphorical fucking cross, the one going to seed and floating off. Gibson, dying, while Goodsir's sad martyred cow's eyes avoid him with all the beautiful trickery of these flatly twilit nights.

Hickey ignores Goodsir as he sheathes his knife in his boot and measures out a drop of laudanum into his own flask of filched rum, which he had been saving for a special occasion or for some bribe or another, as he'd never any intention of imbibing it himself. He'd always split his share of grog among others, among those who'd considered themselves confidantes of Hickey's back in the days of filling Navy rations, when the rum was still a part of said rations. This had curried him cheap, quick favor, early on, which made people more generously inclined later, when trading away their tobacco and suchlike to him. More likely to at least lend him an ear. He pinches Goodsir's nose with clinical dispassion until Goodsir opens his mouth for air and the potent tincture of opium and alcohol can be poured down his throat.

Goodsir sputters and chokes some, a few drops of burning rum no doubt having gotten into the old air tubes, but he swallows when Hickey clamps his hand over Goodsir's mouth so tightly that all the flesh and Hickey's pink nail beds are pressed white, and from thereon he swallows without further protest. Hickey makes him drink until the flask is half empty, and each time that Hickey tips in another mouthful he puts his hand around Goodsir's bristly neck to feel the resentful undulation of the esophagus beneath the skin at the tail end of each swallow, and then he'll press his hand in even tighter around the throat and squeeze until the man's mouth again opens for that of the little metal flask's.

Goodsir doesn't try to ask why. He doesn't ask Hickey a single thing, and not once does he attempt to spit out a mouthful of what he is given, not even as the drug starts in on him. Must be mistakenly relieved to be going under.

Hickey lets Goodsir slip from his grasp and sink to lie on the floor in a languorous torpor before he puts away the flask, unrolls Goodsir's own collection of surgical implements, and starts pulling each of them out for inspection.

Bone saw. Clamps. A great number of things which might as well be a delectable assortment of medieval torture devices. Hickey tilts a serrated blade in the beam from the tent's ventilation flap so that it throws a pallid gray stripe of what light there is into Goodsir's bleary eyes, and they can only flutter lazily, his gaze swimming around Hickey with mindless circular purpose like minnows in a cup. Trapped alive and luminous.

Now he has them hooked. Now they're plunged too deep into dreams for them to look away.

“You won't kill him,” Gibson says, and Goodsir's eyelids draw shut across his reflective sight in what might be disappointment.

Goodsir's entire visage is much more tranquil when acting asleep. Younger than he always looks at first glance; same as Billy.

“Now why would I do that,” says Hickey, selecting a scalpel. He shuffles closer to Goodsir and rolls him prone. With his back to Billy he slips one hand beneath Goodsir's sideways head, lifting his heavy skull from the floor. He cradles that whiskered cheek of Goodsir's in his hand and he leans down to whisper tenderly into Goodsir's ear.

“I'd never kill you,” he says. “Not _you,_ Dr. Goodsir. Not such a fine, _clever_ doctor as yourself.”

Goodsir, despite all his playing dead, shivers, his head rocking heavier against Hickey's palm. His eyes flutter briefly open again, glinting through the drugged glaze and the wet eyelashes, and then he squeezes them closed. His cheeks and the tips of his ears are hot red with a drunken blush, and Hickey can see his consciousness giving in to the seductively warm numbness of the tincture glowing throughout his belly and veins.

Hickey rubs his fingertips into Goodsir's scalp without scratching, and, as soft as rose petals and every word a thorn, he whispers: “It's not so bad for you as all that, my dear Harry. My gentle little Harry.”

Some wetness escaped from the eyes makes its way to Hickey's hand, but with only a single sobbing hitch of the breath Goodsir seems to forget why he is upset, and he surrenders the weight of his head entirely over into Hickey's care.

He's a lightweight, as it so turns out. A truer dawn is barely leaking into the tent by the time that Hickey is satisfied in his having lulled Goodsir into stupidity. He has drooled over Hickey's hand by then as well.

“Billy, come here.”

“I don't think—”

“I'll need your help with this,” says Hickey.

Gibson is still for a little while before there is the rustling of him rousing himself from the bed.

“Here,” Hickey says. He passes Goodsir's head to Gibson, flexes his fingers, and trades the scalpel over into them long enough to excavate an earlier prepared cigarillo from his coat pocket, pinch it between his lips, and set it alight with a match from the pocket opposite. He's been mixing his tobacco with sawdust to stretch out his reserves and it is harsher in the throat than usual as he inhales.

Gibson is knelt with both his hands cupped underneath Goodsir's head. Hickey exhales, pulls in another deep lungful of smoke to start the ember crawling closer to his teeth, and then plucks the cigarillo from his mouth to gesture with it. “You'll need a hand to hold him down, at least.”

“What are you going to do to him?” Gibson asks, his tone incurious.

Hickey replaces the cig between his lips and waddles backward on his heels while working Goodsir's trousers and underclothes down without finesse. With the braces already off he doesn't even need to unbutton the trousers; none of them fill out their clothes as they used to, though Goodsir's arse, he's pleased to find, is not so poorly off as most. “Left or right?” he asks, and he twirls the scalpel.

Gibson does not answer.

“Oh, come off it. Or I'll pick both.”

Gibson raises his emotionless face. He slides one of his hands around to rest atop Goodsir's skull, and he absently strokes his fingers through Goodsir's hair. “Are you going to carve your initials into him?” he asks.

Hickey taps loose a few hot flakes of ash over the small of Goodsir's back. Goodsir whimpers in faint cognizance of discomfort until Gibson's soothing hand reminds him that he is not alone.

“I was considering that.”

“What letters are they?” asks Gibson.

E.C. doesn't say anything. He stares into Gibson's eyes and Gibson does not look away, nor even blink. Not until Hickey finally, petulantly, tosses the scalpel aside and puts out his cigarillo against the flesh of Goodsir's right buttock. The coal hisses as it is smashed to smothered.

Goodsir mewls, arse clenching and hips driving forward, and Gibson holds him through it.

* * *

Hickey swallows Gibson's cock down to the base. Billy does not harden anymore, no matter how lavish his lover's devotions, but he is still sensitive, still wonderfully responsive and warm. Warmer for the heat of Hickey's mouth around him, and the skin of him is smooth against Hickey's tongue. The blond curls into which Hickey burrows his nose smell equally of arousal's musk and of sickly sour sweat, and he breathes deeply of the scent.

Hickey licks and sucks him until he can feel the pulse of this beloved living thing held safe as a velvet-shelled egg in his mouth. Living all for him, fragile, and hot with blood. And when Hickey presses into Gibson he is toothless. He is soft.

Gibson asks him his name and he tells him.

* * *

“You mustn't try this anymore,” Gibson says.

Hickey is lying on the rocks in the coat through which he'd stabbed Irving, and he is looking at the other coat which is the sky at its darkest, its navy blue pierced through with the faintest of stars. The rocks are cold beneath his head, his hair spread out on the stones and gravel, all of it clean for it's all clean in the Arctic.

“I don't know what you mean,” says Goodsir, and he is too angry to even hide that sullen anger of his for the sake of this lackadaisical lie.

All that he had been left with was one tiny scorch mark, which is already healing into one tiny scar, which is itself situated somewhere where he will hardly even ever see it unless he specifically goes looking, and yet this most minor of rebukes had been enough to throw Goodsir into a lasting and twitchy ill temper. After Hickey had so courteously left and allowed Gibson to nurse him for his hangover, too.

It's probably because Goodsir cannot remember anything. Does not know exactly what transpired, beyond that whatsoever it was which happened, it'd put a cigarillo burn into his arse cheek and had made Gibson even more doleful and clingy toward Goodsir than he had been before. More defensive both _of_ and _toward_ him, too, which apparently inspires in Goodsir a spark of aggressiveness.

“Do you want him to _geld_ you or something, is that it?” Gibson asks. “He would, you know.”

Gibson has intercepted Goodsir behind a tent at the edge of their encampment. Hickey is on the other side of the tent, listening, and so, he'd assume, is Mr. Diggle, whose tent this is, and in which he must be cowering. Hickey supposes that Diggle would already have turned down Goodsir's invitation to accompany him in his latest escape attempt, as Hodgson also has.

“You could let me go,” says Goodsir. “You could just let me leave.” And then, very quietly, so that it would have been impossible to hear had the wind not relented just then, Goodsir says: “Please.”

There is silence, and then, slowly, Gibson's laughter can be heard, rising again even as the wind does. A bitter, scornful sound, which is entirely of disappointment.

* * *

“I love you,” Hickey tells him.

“You've never said that to me before,” says Gibson.

“It's this place,” says Hickey. “It allows for impossibilities.”

“So your loving me was impossible.”

“That's not what I said.”

“I love you, too,” says Gibson. “I love you even as you are here.” _Even with what you're going to do,_ he does not say.

“Have I ever been anyone else?” asks Hickey, smiling.

* * *

It comes down to tug-o'-war. Goodsir looks down and away from Hickey when he returns, and so he does not see the knife, nor see when Hickey slides the knife neat through Billy's back, through the ribs and at his heart. He embraces Billy from behind so that he will not see his face and he makes it as sudden and merciful as he can.

Goodsir hears Gibson's cry and panics. Hickey can tell this because he hesitates long enough to set what he is holding down upon a side table before he rushes to Gibson's aid; his first instinct is not to drop an inconsequential burden but to ensure that he does not break it, even as he must abandon it in favor of a simultaneous greater need. He does not even use it to try and clock Hickey over the head as Hickey himself would've. Only sets it down on the rickety side table, swiftly and automatically.

He grabs at Gibson, and then at Hickey, trying to push him off, trying to part them. Gibson is fairly quiet, and the two of them are, too, both struggling in grim, furious silence with Billy clasped tight between them.

Hickey watches Goodsir's expression change, waiting for Billy Gibson to die. Goodsir's panic morphing into a crumpled snarl of desperation as he looks into Billy's eyes and watches what Hickey isn't. He tries with all his desperate heart to make Hickey un-stab Billy's own but of course he dies, and Goodsir's fight with it, the both drained out inside.

As Goodsir moves away he puts his hand to Gibson's head, reaching out into Gibson's curls with his bare fingertips, the rest of his gentle hand all thickly swaddled in wool. It's mostly regret, there, but he does it with that hypocritical and pompous piety. Like a corpse is something to be reverent of. Or as though absolving the corpse of its own death: Saint Goodsir in action. Thank God for Saint Goodsir, for _whatever_ would be done without him.

Goodsir drops his hand and then his gaze from Hickey's afterward, nodding somewhat, and says nothing with his voice.

The oh-so-tragic Saint Goodsir turns his back to them as if granting him the privacy to mourn. Hickey holds Gibson's rapidly cooling body in his arms for some time longer.

* * *

It is a cloudy day and the sky is flat and glowing white with it. Clean, clean, clean, the air empty of anything besides wind. A good day for memories to warm the belly.

The meat is almost raw, and there is a fishy softness to it, as though it is a single pink flake wet in his hand. A livid salmon color compared to his cold white hands, and his nailbeds are grouted 'round with blackish grime. Dirt to season the lead. It doesn't taste like pork, exactly, for it is also ambrosia. Manna. What _would_ Irving have called it?

This should be a feast. There should be relief and merriment and _gratitude._ Not a one of them was prepared to kill a man so as to _eat_ him and they're indebted to Hickey for his having done so, and he can see that they despise him for it, because Hickey has the _inhumanity_ to survive.

There's one _brave_ man, however, who despises him most. It is the only man who is not present at the feast. He's back there, sulking in his tent, licking his nonexistent wounds.

“Mr. Goodsir,” Hickey calls. “Come out.”

There is a very pointed lack of response. Hickey gives Goodsir a couple of minutes to reconsider, after which he sends Des Voeux to haul Goodsir out of his tent and before the assembly.

Hickey's shoulders still ache faintly where Goodsir had grabbed him in their three-way clinch. Goodsir has perhaps put bruises on him. He finds, upon viewing Goodsir again, that he is still so furious that his head goes light and he does not have to fake his coldly beneficent smile of welcome.

Goodsir isn't openly afraid. Contemptuous, yes. His spirit a little dampened, for sure. But he's dead behind the eyes; he'll only show the fear if Hickey teases it out via the reliable method. Maybe he'll twist Hodgson's arm or break his fingers. Maybe take his knife to Mr. Diggle.

Maybe he'll do something else.

To Goodsir, he proffers his last morsel of meat.

“No,” says Goodsir.

“No?” Hickey says.

A venomous disdain curls Goodsir's lip. “No, thank you,” he says, as though that will get him out of it. Too dignified a character to go without pleasantries, him.

“Do you consider yourself superior to us?” asks Hickey. Goodsir does not rise to the bait, so he continues, pitching his voice to carry, playing to the crowd. “You consider yourself too _pure_ to partake? I'd think you must, to snub our good company on an occasion such as this. It must make you feel ever so high and mighty to abstain even in the face of common sense.

“Take off your boots.”

The end bit takes Goodsir a moment. If it catches him by surprise he is too stubborn to show it, and too committed to avoiding a lesson even less palatable to him than this. With Des Voeux posted at his back and with only the light crunching of the rocks beneath him as he balances on one foot and then the other, he removes his boots, and drops them to one side.

“Socks, too,” says Hickey.

The socks follow. He stands on the sharp stones barefoot and unrepentant. The irreparably stained surgical apron is gone, but he is still in his waistcoat and rolled sleeves. The tops of his feet are even whiter than the insides of his arms and his toenails are ghastly to behold.

Hickey stands up and steps into his space, nudging his oversize boots against Goodsir's naked toes, and, like before, Goodsir does not back down even when in imminent danger of being trod upon.

If there had been even the slightest hint of apprehension in him then Hickey might have let up. But because he is threatening the brave little doctor's own bodily self, Goodsir, perversely, instead stands firm. He does not care.

Hickey wants him to care. To be afraid for himself as the others are. He wants to meet Goodsir's infuriating fatalism with such a shock that Goodsir's composure regarding Hickey is as irreparably stained by subjugation as his apron is with blood. He doesn't want to have to hold a knife to the ship's boy's neck to achieve this. He wants to see it when he holds his knife to _Goodsir._ He wants to look at Goodsir and he wants to _see it there._

It's downright offensive for such a weak man to believe himself so strong. It's practically righting a wrong, for Hickey to set about instilling that truth into this man. The man whom Hickey made butcher Billy Gibson because Cornelius hadn't wanted to do that to his Billy himself. Because he'd been _weak._ He'd been weak, and somehow Goodsir had _known,_ and _dared_ defy him.

“All of it,” says Hickey. Whenever Goodsir has the gall to look back at him with that _face_ of his, Hickey wants to drive his clawed hand into Goodsir's skull, to pop his eyeballs with fingers plunged through the softness of each socket and his thumb hooked around Goodsir's upper teeth, and he'd curl his grip into him, and he'd squeeze or shake or _crush_ his brains out.

First Goodsir removes the kerchief from his once-crisp collar, winds it into a roll, and tucks it away in a pocket. Then the waistcoat, one button at a time. Hands bare, the backs of the wrists as hairy as his hairy ankles, yet somehow the shapes of his hands are finer than Hickey had remembered now that they are not in their mitts. Goodsir takes a step back when he gets to the trousers, just so that he will not brush against Hickey as he bends to remove them, and he stands up quick as he can from that. He's slower with the buttons of his shirt than with the waistcoat. Too fastidious to fumble, but there is a tremor to him now, a hesitancy, as he keeps pausing to wait on clemency which he should know won't come.

The thread on the buttons is mismatched. It was Gibson who had picked up the buttons which Hickey had cut off of Goodsir's clothes, and Gibson who had sewn those buttons back into place, with his own time and needle and thread and patience and his long, thin hands, all the bones in them starkly visible. He'd sewn that button on with blue thread, and he'd stitched _that_ one through with white. That stigmata bruise had never faded from his palm and Hickey had kissed it every time they were alone.

The shirt falls off Goodsir's shoulders and the wind catches it and sets the pile of it skittering over the rocks.

It's _not_ clemency which makes Hickey stop Goodsir there, just as his agonized hands float to his placket. Hickey catches Goodsir's wrist, and lifts their arms between them, and he asks, “Are you so eager to neglect yourself, Doctor? To endanger yourself like this. You'd strip naked before all and sundry, without question, in _these temperatures,_ rather than eat one bite of fresh meat to help ward off all the ills of a Goldner's diet. And that concerns me.”

Hickey turns to the slouched and silent assembly. Except for Tozer and Des Voeux, they look at Hickey only when he talks, and only in fleeting glances. For the most part all eyes are on the dark, shiny, wave-edged planks of the grand dining table upon its crates. At the pewter plates and scraps of pink. None of them have ceased to at least pick at their food; what a circle of mastication they make.

“That concerns all of us,” Hickey announces to them. “That our only doctor should endanger himself means that he _purposefully endangers_ the health of us all. We can't have the scurvy taking him, now can we? _Now can we, men?”_

There is a ragged, dutiful chorus of agreement.

“That's right, men,” says Hickey approvingly, and he flings Goodsir at the table.

Goodsir catches himself with a jolt against the edge and Hickey shoves him down into Hickey's very own seat at the head of it. Hickey is still holding the meat, that bit of Billy's flesh, and he stuffs it into Goodsir's mouth from behind, as far in as his hand will reach, and has taken his fingers from Goodsir's mouth before Goodsir's teeth have a chance to clamp shut.

He does not, however, attempt to bite Hickey, but instead gags and spits the tidbit halfway across the table.

In the next instant Hickey has boxed Goodsir's ear in punishment, slapping his palm so hard against the side of Goodsir's head that Goodsir tumbles from his seat. Hickey hoists him back up by the hair and slams his open hand against Goodsir's ear again, and then does the other one, too, so that the disorientation has Goodsir whole in its clutches and his head's no doubt ringing like a church bell calling in the sheep. Hickey's palm certainly stings from it.

Despite this Goodsir still resists when Hickey shoves the flask of leftover laced rum between his teeth, and most of that initial minor mouthful of amber tincture sprays out in a crystalline spout of mist, stinging Hickey's eyes.

Hickey punches him, then, a showy roundhouse squarely on the ear which sends Goodsir to the ground yet again because his reflexes are not a fighter's, and though Goodsir still does fight Hickey to the best of his negligible ability Hickey heaves Goodsir up and pinches Goodsir's nose shut and empties every last drop of the drugged rum down his throat.

Goodsir refuses to calm until the effects suffuse him. That reeling of his from having had his bell rung partly transmutes into that of an inebriated pitch and sway, and as he loses more of his faculties he begins to lean into Hickey's hands, to rest the back of his head against Hickey's stomach when he's hoisted onto the crate to face the length of the table once more. He goes limp as he counts on Hickey to hold him up.

The same bit of flesh is placed on Goodsir's tongue and Hickey wraps his hand over Goodsir's mouth, flattening his beard. Keeps the hand there until Goodsir has chewed and swallowed. Curls his other hand around Goodsir's throat to hold him steady and to feel it when he does.

Hickey watches the others as they wait for Goodsir to finish his portion. Manson appears ready to cry, and Hodgson, perched apart from the riffraff as he is, only stares down at his fancy officer's plate and silver cutlery with all the joy of a kicked cur and the sort of guilt which only the human animal knows of. Des Voeux is unmoved, and Tozer is looking back at Hickey with a kind of dubious, almost speculative censure, but eventually even he looks off.

When Hickey leaves with Goodsir, half-carrying him as he stumbles like a sleepwalker at his side, none of them follow.

* * *

Divesting him of his clothes takes longer without the expediency of cutting them. Hickey's hands shake with fury over each button as he undresses Goodsir's giant hirsute doll of a body, as he helps steady Goodsir so Hickey can pull his undershirt over his idiotically _nodding_ head. He's a pallid little _thing_ when stripped and dumped naked onto his own stale pallet; an anonymous entity. The good doctor will not be himself anymore, after this.

The man mumbles unintelligibly before his face is shoved down into his pillow, and he stays where he is put. The laudanum, the rum, the beating, the cannibalism; one or all of these has him compliant.

He does try to crawl away when he realizes what is in store, when Hickey is astride the backs of Goodsir's thighs and undoes his own trousers only enough so as to pull out his hard prick to spit on it, but Hickey pins Goodsir's head again, and Goodsir falls into stillness with his arms outstretched. Flattening himself to the pallet, shivering some and clenching when he feels Hickey's rigid cock poking hotly between his cheeks. Yet _still he stays,_ and Hickey aligns himself without issue.

The same cannot be said of Goodsir's body in its acceptance of the intrusion.

It is incredibly tight and tender, this plush constriction into which Hickey sinks, and he does so all in one harsh shove. As soon as Hickey feels his hipbones flush against the plumpness of Goodsir's lovely arse, he withdraws and thrusts the whole length of his yard back into Goodsir in immediate brutality, and as he continues at this callous pace Goodsir begins to bleed, and he bleeds until the drag of Hickey's strokes are lubricated into a slide.

Throughout this Goodsir lows as though dying. The noise makes Hickey want to bite him, to impress bloody tooth-marks into him and take a chunk out. To hurt him _more;_ because bite wounds go fatally green too easily, he does not do this. Hickey thrusts his hips all the harder instead, and watches Goodsir's hands grasp the corners of the blankets for plaintive purchase as Hickey finds his rhythm in him.

Not so stoic anymore, isn't it.

Feels good to hurt someone. It feels like taking something back, in the most pleasurable of ways, every vindictive stab stirring another greater swell of pleasure, and Goodsir is hurt with such underwhelming ease, the grip of his arse now so hot and wet and tight around Hickey's cock, that the deed is fast to its completion.

The orgasm is long, and fantastic, and for some reason it leaves Hickey drained into disgust. He lays his clothed, exhausted body against Goodsir's clammy naked one, with his brow to Goodsir's spine, and with his sated stand still pulsing in Goodsir's arse. And he is repulsed at himself for his proximity to Goodsir's shivering form.

He snaps his hips a last spiteful time before he lifts himself from Goodsir and onto his knees. As his member slips out of heat and into the cold a trickle of fluids follows. Hickey sits back on his heels to observe this as he catches his breath, snatching the doctor's nearby undershirt and drying himself with a hiss at the coarseness of the cloth before tucking his softened prick out of the cold.

The heavy ring he finds then must have fallen from one of Goodsir's pockets somewhere. Found around Gibson's neck, where he'd worn it on a string. Hickey picks it up and slips it onto his finger, and then into his own pocket, instead, where it weighs heavier.

His grip buries bruises into the backs of Goodsir's thighs as he spreads Goodsir's legs farther apart, and he relocates his right hand to one of Goodsir's buttocks, his palm over the cigarillo scar and his fingers digging into useful flesh. The viscous pearly glimmer of seed leaking from inside of the man is very pale against Goodsir's copious black hair; there's some pretty pink to the pearlescence, too, for if he's _pricked_ does he not _bleed._

The probing lengths of two of Hickey's fingers fit smoothly into Goodsir's slick, wrecked arsehole, sucked all the way in, and Goodsir shakes his head from side to side without taking his face from the pillow to breathe; this may have been the same way he would have withstood bad dreams as a child. Pretended not to notice, so as not to be scared.

Hickey finds the jolly spot in the man's arse and massages it. Nice, even pressure, rhythmic application, and Goodsir's provoked into wriggling his hips. Into working himself back along Hickey's fingers so as to roll it harder against that spot, oblivious to all but his own base, miserable sensations. To the arousal which Hickey's building in him.

Upon removal of the fingers Goodsir falls slack. Dead still, and dead weight, and sadly alive when Hickey rolls him onto his back, his eyes shut and tears on his face.

He's stiff from all the ill treatment.

It's a nice endowment. Matches what one might expect from his hands and the color of his lips, and well-shaped, rising up red from the luxuriant mat of black curls which there so densely overtakes Goodsir's white flesh. Hickey cups and palpates Goodsir's warm, hairy purse, rolling it in his palm. Tightens his hand and _twists_ and Goodsir makes a noise when he does, this sour violin note of a thing. His cock jerks and squeezes out a drop of fluid.

Firmly pinching the man's thick, slippery foreskin and pulling it up past the head of his cock until the skin is stretched thinly taut elicits the same delightful response, which is same as the fingering; Goodsir circles his hips and whimpers as Hickey pinches him harder, and, also clenching Goodsir's bollocks in his other hand, Hickey pulls the foreskin upward until the rosy knob is hidden and Goodsir's aroused member is twitching. When Hickey allows Goodsir's elastic foreskin and therefore Goodsir's prick to spring free it snaps away and audibly smacks Goodsir on the stomach, the shiny cockhead emerging brighter than ever as the flushed-dark foreskin retreats.

The red of Goodsir's swollen stand looks good as meat, dripping onto Goodsir's own belly, on the trail of hair leading down from the belly button, and so, without further consideration, Hickey grabs it up, leans down, and takes Goodsir into his mouth.

He encloses his lips tightly around the head and swirls his tongue, tastes him. Cuffs his shaft in his hand and scrapes him with his teeth and only lets up when Goodsir's lax legs are spurred to kicking and he's dribbling over Hickey's fist. Hickey puts his arm across Goodsir's hips to pin him and sticks two fingers back into his hole, and at an unrelenting pace he rubs and sucks until Goodsir spends a plentiful load of tallow for Hickey to swallow.

The doctor cries out weakly at the height of it, hand alighting on the back of Hickey's head as Hickey rises to envelop only the head of Goodsir's prick, but he hasn't the coordination, nor the strength, to pull Hickey away from himself.

With his tongue curled beneath the head and his mouth sealed tight around it, Hickey keeps up a hard, cruel suction without relent, until Goodsir has spilled again. It is only then that he is allowed to slip from Hickey's mouth, and in the main this is to blamed on the ache in Hickey's jaw. The muscles on either side creak as though rusty hinges when he flexes and then shuts it.

He rolls Goodsir over so that he can admire the man's rear, and he fucks Goodsir to sleep with his fingers, torturously languid. When he grows bored he sits up and observes the goose-flesh on Goodsir's arms and legs, and the sweat shining cold in the dip at the small of his back, and how the sweat has somewhat matted down all the man's hair. The trickle of bloodied seed has dried in the nether nest of it, Hickey sees, when he withdraws his pallid hand from the black crevice of Goodsir's equally pallid but darkly haired arse.

Hickey wipes off his fingers on one of Goodsir's buttocks and finds they have pruned beneath all the blood and spunk. He'll have to pare it out from under his nails with his knife.

What could Gibson have seen in him, Hickey wonders. With a scoff to himself he tucks Goodsir's blankets up around him to keep any bits from frostbite and retires to his own tent, where he stares for a long, long time at the empty bed.

* * *

Goodsir's limping all the next day, and his visage is drawn haggard. Moony eyes like the soul fled him and left him a dumb shell.

Hodgson haunts the doctor's footsteps, too timid to escort him for his safety and instead providing some ghost's poor parody of companionship, and even Des Voeux speaks mildly to him.

Hickey twigs to every minor kindness the others show to Goodsir, every respectfully averted gaze, and he adds each one as kindling to the coals of that dirty fire burning around the Gibson-meat in his stomach, lets mount that petty rage until he can taste the soot at the back of his throat. Until it burns at the back of his nose and stings behind his eyes, higher, higher. His mouth has at some point stopped tasting of rotted blood; it had faded since he'd stopped kissing Billy, the last time, with tongues soft in one another's mouths.

It reminds him of after his lashing. How they treat Goodsir. How they couldn't look Hickey in the eye for a fortnight but they'd lent shoulders for him to lean on at his first slightest stumble. They don't like a shirker, but they'll pity a _victim._ They'll sympathize enough to trust him to trust them. No matter that it is lies.

At dinner, Hickey strides to the far end of the table, and, arms outstretched to gather them, asks, “Will you be joining us for our meal, Mr. Goodsir?”

Goodsir touches the knot of his neckerchief, tightening it before forcing his hands down to his sides, open. “No,” he says, shaking his head in exhausted resolution. In resignation of himself and the torments he must put himself through. _Fucking_ Christ.

Hickey makes a noise of consideration and cocks his head. Tozer is pacing the perimeter of the little crowd, Hickey's merry crew of mutineers, squinting himself into grimacing impassivity. He meets Hickey's eyes and then doesn't. Nods to himself like Goodsir for the _ingrate_ is getting to Solomon, too.

“Then you won't mind waiting in my tent for me.”

He doesn't respond to this except to trudge away.

For his meal Hickey eats the scant flesh which is to be gleaned from Gibson's severed hands, picking apart the bones joint by joint, stripping the fingers. Eating the cartilage and the marrow. The bruised palm.

Goodsir is standing in the center of Hickey's tent, his back to the entrance, his head held high.

“Not wise, to put your back to the room like that,” says Hickey, as if helpful.

“My fighting hasn't stopped you,” says Goodsir, and he says this flatly. It is only a philosophical observation; he intends to give Hickey no more, and there's the lie of him: He's fighting right now, wielding composure as a shield.

His knees hit the tarped ground hard, Hickey's hands atop his shoulders shoving him down, and Hickey lets him go only to worm his hand beneath Goodsir's bearded chin and to claw his cold fingers into the hairy warmth of Goodsir's throat.

“Don't talk,” is what is said to him.

Then Hickey chokes him for awhile, and when fully conscious Goodsir takes it in perfect quiet.

* * *

Hickey bathes and consumes part of Gibson's left foot. It is not as spectacular a meal as other parts, perhaps, but the others are so squeamish that Hickey takes the feet for himself as he had the hands, and he disarticulates them and picks out slivers of meat from the tops of the feet, cutting in between the bones just the same, and then breaking each tiny bone open to scoop out the marrow. These bone shards will then go to steep in a pot of water which he will later drink. He'll not have any part of Gibson go to waste.

Goodsir waits in Hickey's tent again.

“Tell me what you remember,” says Hickey, to Goodsir's back. “When I branded you. Tell me, and I'll make it easier on you.”

Goodsir is dressed in downright immaculate fashion today. Too rough a silhouette for the magazines—shovel-handed, anvil-footed, beard and locks untamed—but his collar is scrubbed neat and white and the knot of his black neckerchief is pushed up to his throat. He has his Navy woolen overcoat on, open over the waistcoat. His throat is purpled and also one of his ears, which has puffed into a cauliflower. “I was insensate,” he says; there is an edge to him, a knife hidden on him somewhere. Coat pocket, or up his sleeve. The man's too changed for there not to be.

“Why, you must have sensed _something,”_ Hickey wheedles. “What of the second time?”

To this Goodsir gazes at Hickey without blinking, though his eyes are red and his face tired. The edge is in his hand, under his mitt, because Hickey sees how Goodsir is pulling the thick cuff of his greatcoat down to hide it. “I don't recall,” says Goodsir. It's the precise voice Hickey's heard him use on patients before he bleeds them.

Hickey takes the ring from his pocket. Goodsir flinches at the glint of metal, expecting Hickey's knife, and Hickey throws the ring at his chest.

Goodsir flinches again in trying to catch it, arms snapping up, and it has already hit him and is going clattering somewhere when he fails and Hickey has caught _him,_ and, having seized Goodsir's right arm, Hickey strips off Goodsir's glove and relieves him of the scalpel, the blade slicing Goodsir's palm as Hickey pries his fingers from it one by one but breaks none.

“Shall I remind you?” Hickey asks, leering into Goodsir's face, crushing Goodsir's empty hand in his, the hot blood welling between them and Hickey's other hand lifting the little steel fleam to caress Goodsir's lips with it.

The punch from Goodsir stuns him. He stumbles a few steps backward, holding his throbbing cheek in disbelief, and the flesh is already swelling and hot; the doctor stares at him in squander of another precious instant and then makes to run.

Hickey lunges after him, and brings him down.

“Did you learn your silence from _her?”_ Hickey snarls, tearing at Goodsir's clothes so he can tear at his skin and tear into him, and Goodsir's breath quickens until it is panicked hyperventilation. He grunts once with pain, then whimpers until even the breath is crushed out of him, but throughout it he says nothing.

* * *

Goodsir's tent stays up but he is only permitted sleep in Hickey's. This has the desired result of keeping him sleep-deprived and close at hand.

Sometimes they spend hours lying together where it smells like Gibson, Hickey's body at the back of Goodsir's, and neither of them sleep. Hickey doesn't need to, whereas Goodsir fears to be unconscious in Hickey's arms, and with good reason, for when Goodsir is asleep his rigidity finally becomes soft, and Hickey is always overtaken by the biting urge when presented with softness.

The few times they make love like that it is almost as though Billy's never left him. He rocks into Goodsir from behind, whispering appreciation into his ear and kissing the back of his neck, and Hickey covers Goodsir's mouth when waking up to this makes him weep.

* * *

“Your Dr. Goodsir,” Hickey says to Crozier, because Crozier will not indulge him with speculation regarding the Tuunbaq, and so Hickey will tell Crozier something he'll love even less. “Do you want to know what I did to him?”

Crozier's face almost lends itself to the squint-eyed anguish, what with the sunlight outlining him, the sun in Hickey's eyes keeping Hickey himself from seeing much of the “stumble” scuffs on him other than that they are still dark and wet on his freckled, weather-beaten visage.

“He's dear to you, is he not?” Hickey asks, to stoke the resurgence of rage, to see Crozier's innate ill will warp the mask of _good man_ which he's adopted since drying out. “I couldn't ever quite capture his affections as you have.”

“What is it that you've done to him, then?” Crozier demands hoarsely.

“Have you never _looked_ at him?” Hickey presses, smiling through a drag on his cigarillo and speaking in a croak with the smoke. “How sweet and soft-spoken he is? Helpful, deferential.” He takes another drag and breathes the smoke out his nose as he leans in toward Crozier. Waits until Crozier is looking square at him before speaking. “You've never imagined him mewling under you? Never seen his mouth and imagined your prick down his throat with those eyes of his looking up?”

Crozier turns his face away from Hickey, who can tell by Crozier's expression that he knows what Hickey's done, and that this knowledge hurts him deeply. Hickey, naturally, smiles.

* * *

Goodsir doesn't try to resist Hickey when he interrupts Goodsir's suicide and renders it a mere attempt. Hickey smashes the doctor against the ground, and then again, for he's _furious._ He only is ever angry at Goodsir, these days— _afraid,_ when he'd seen the glint drawing its sip of scarlet from Goodsir's wrist, and was cognizant of the implications; the prospect of Goodsir offing himself early. Some little voice in Hickey's heart screamed, some spasm in an aorta, venom in a ventricle: _He's all that's left._

Everyone else, Hickey's finally at peace with; he already knows the Tuunbaq will slay whomever he brings to their union, and kill them to a man, and he does not care. None of them matter.

Nothing will matter before the beauty of the beast's acceptance of him, when Hickey will make his vow to it in flesh as had the Netsilik shaman, and finally he'll attain ultimate belonging. Finally he'll be recognized as special. Someone to be revered. Someone to whom is owed a power unholy, the likes of which supersedes all the wan shadows of this worthless world.

But he is so _angry_ at Goodsir. For having had the audacity to try and escape him _again._ To kill himself when his life was Hickey's. _Hickey's,_ to save, or to kill and eat. Even if Hickey gives his own life over, Goodsir's life will remain Hickey's, and his alone.

Because Gibson's in him now. And Hickey's not done with him yet. A worthless worldly animal thing, Goodsir is, mattering only to him, and after the man called Hickey is one with the creature, Goodsir may then matter not a whit.

But for now. For now, Goodsir is vassal, a mere vessel remade malleable as clay.

* * *

Hickey doesn't sleep, but oh does he so dream, and it is of Billy Gibson.

More healthy and hale than was probably even possible for Gibson when alive, with the mirage of a tropical sun having kissed a burn along the top of his nose, his hair bleached out until there is no separation between his skull and the sky. The ocean reaches fingers for his heels. He's smiling the way he only smiled early on, a neat, coy little thing which is extinguished by the weight of observation.

Hickey makes sure only to ever look at Billy from the corner of his eye, so that the smile and the soul will be there. Gibson for his part faces E.C. at all times, and does not turn his back. Hickey never sees the wound he made but when the dream leaves him it is Goodsir who is warming his bed.

His shape is wrong in Hickey's arms, but he's learned obedience; Goodsir sleeps while in them.


End file.
